The Golden Compass, which comes out nationwide on Friday, has all the ingredients of a standard big-budget fantasy epic. Complex fantastical universe, surprisingly like our own—check. Talking animals—check (several times over). Ian McKellen and/or Christopher Lee—check and check! Shadowy, evil villain bent on controlling the entire magical world—check.
And that’s where things get complicated. The Golden Compass is based on the first book in a trilogy by Philip Pullman, a “militant English atheist,” in the words of the Catholic League, a Catholic anti-defamation non-profit group. Pullman has said he set out to write books that were “the Anti-Narnia,” that tore down Christian ideals rather than espousing them. By the end of the last book, he had killed God and unmasked the “mistake” that is Christianity.
Clearly, this meant that serious decisions had to be made in adapting the book to the screen. After several failed starts (shed a tear for the Tom Stoppard version of the script, deemed too intellectual—duh), the final version removed almost all references to religion, sin, the Church or God in general, and remade the Magisterium—clearly a revisionist version of the Catholic Church—into a vaguely authoritarian, power-hungry tyranny, the Empire crossed with 1984.
Naturally, everybody’s angry. The diehard fans have done what diehard fans of fantasy novels do and taken to the Internet, where they are vociferous and very mean. The National Secular Society in England, of which Pullman is an honorary associate, has voiced its complaints about the changes. And, perhaps most pivotally, the Catholic League is starting a boycott.
Interestingly, their angle is roughly the same as the secular side’s—the story has been sanitized to the point where you can hardly tell that it’s based on atheistic books. Thus, the League argues, “unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present,” and we all know where that would lead. The problem, the League says, is that these movies are selling atheism. To kids! And they’re doing it in a “stealthy” and “pernicious” way!
The religion game is old news in Hollywood, and in terms of selling tickets, it probably won’t be an issue. Movies that religious groups push—The Passion of the Christ, The Chronicles of Narnia—can do outstandingly well, but movies that religious groups fight—The Da Vinci Code, anything with sex, homosexuality or drugs—can also do outstandingly well. People can be pushed into seeing flashy movies, but not pushed away from them.
The Golden Compass has a fantastical story, an exciting cast and a good team of artists. But more questionable is the artistic effect of this whole debacle. I’ll probably see it opening day, but I’m afraid it will leave me with a craving for Nietzsche (what, don’t you get those?). We don’t need another mass-marketed picture preaching the values of the individual, and, yes, we get it, totalitarianism is bad. These aren’t interesting questions. New Line, you knew you weren’t going to make everyone happy, but you could have at least made a good movie. The Golden Compass is one of those books that you can’t wait to see on screen, and not just for the polar bears and the shiny magical things. Movies are good at conveying the otherworldly, the mysterious, the awe-inspiring ideas that are fundamental to religion, too. A story as intellectually rigorous and well-imagined as Pullman’s could be a truly fantastic (in every sense of the word) movie, one that expands horizons and challenges ideas. Here’s hoping it does well enough to make the second and third movies just that.
